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The purpose of the Florida Native Plant Society (FNPS) is to promote the preservation, conservation, and restoration of the native plants and native plant communities of Florida. This blog presents ideas and information to further the cause of Florida's native plants and ecosystems.

In Case You Missed It...Noteworthy highlights from the speakers at the FNPS 36th Annual Conference, May 18-22, 2016

With the loss in oversight of growth management at the state level, we need to step in with science to help local governments understand the impact of decisions in new building projects and sprawl. He quoted Frank Egler: Ecosystems not only are more complex than we think, but more complex than we can think.

Panthers need a population of 240 individuals to be delisted by the Federal Government as an endangered species. The Florida Black Bear was delisted four years ago but it still needs corridors for connectivity and exchange of genetic information for healthy offspring. They have an expanding population, but a shrinking habitat. The Panther would do well in the Florida Panhandle, but females’ offspring stay in the home range of their mothers, so it would take many generations to expand there on their own.

See the Conservation Trust for Florida, Inc. for more on protection and connecting Florida’s wild and working landscapes.

The concept being: we need to conserve 50% of
the planet’s natural vegetation intact to sequester CO2 so the human population
can persist.Rumage says that 7.3
billion of us have already modified ½ the surface of the earth and we need to
stop now to keep breathing.He also
reported more than six times the amount of land sourced plastic is in the oceans
than plankton.He says we confuse
“legally safe” (i.e. water standards) and “harmful”.He talked about traveling to international
seminars and seeing (interior) vertical vs. (exterior) horizontal
agriculture.

Rumage thinks 6 billion of us will live in
cities by 2050. Solutions to human existence will require an intersection of art
and design.Rumage’s book is This Spaceship Earth.

Dr. Patrick Bohlen
from University of Central Florida (UCF) spent 11 years at Archbold Biological
Station. He reports 82% of North Americans already live
in cities. In comparison, 4.74 % of US land use is urban, but in Florida it is 16% now and
projected (by the 1000 Friends of Florida) to be 34% by 2060.Six of the fastest growing metro areas in the
nation are here in Florida. We are back to receiving 1000 new residents
daily, but we still have bears, bobcats
and coyotes on UCF campus thanks to the Little Econ River on west and Big Econ
River on the east.Gallberry doesn’t survive on campus in the
landscape due to high pH in water used for irrigation.Same for longleaf pine.

Dr. John Weishampel
introduced us to LiDAR technology for mapping Caracol in the Cayo District of Belize from the air
and how it depicts ancient human landscape legacies on the contemporary forest
structure. Inhabited from @900 BC to
1050 AD it supported 100,000 people…till it didn’t. With this new tool we are learning human
impact on the land.

Dr. Hyun Jung Cho
has an ID book: Plants in Urban Water
Ways within the Halifax River/Mosquito Lagoon that will be a superb
resource state-wide. Bethune-Cookman
University, Professor, Integrated Environmental Science, choh@cookman.edu

Dr. Richard
Hisenbeck’s topic is the Nature Conservancy’s Florida Panther Conservation
and Connectivity. With our 20 million
population and 100 million tourists each year, he still has hope for the female
panther offspring moving themselves (eventually) into rich habitat in the panhandle. He told us of work with Lykes Brothers at
Fish Eating Creek to provide a crucial 355,000 protected acres (plus a buffer
of 68,000) for movement up a narrow corridor (through Lykes) to a traditional
panther Caloosahatchee River crossing.
His equation for panther survival in Florida is 4 million acres. With the 2.25 million that is the Everglades,
Big Cypress, Panther Conservation core and the 1.75 million acres (on 90
individual properties) between Lykes and Disney Wilderness Area, he believes we
have what they need. Current numbers are
upward of 160 cats and maybe as many as 180.

Dr. Austin Mast
of FSU’s Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium wants our help to get all our buried
museum specimens (including herbarium sheets) into digital Information and scientific
communication via iDigBio. There
is a worldwide blitz event Oct.23-26, 2016.
Learn more on how easy it to contribute a little time at www.idigbio.org and sernec.appstate.edu and notesfromnature.org. They will work
with you (or your group’s) special interests in the cataloging. Even preschoolers can help. They look at 3 interpretations of each label
to eliminate errors.

Dr. Charles Hinkle
has studied C02 at the Kennedy space Center since 1990. Ambient/background CO2 was 350/ppm when he
stated and now it is 400/ppm. At UCF he
records significant differences with tests from the west (Orlando urban smog)
and to east (green space, agriculture and St. John’s River). The Department of Transportation is funding
his study on CO2 sinks. Longleaf Pine
forests are back to sequestering CO2 after a prescribed burn within 2 to 3
months.

Humans have been robbing bees for their honey
for 15, 000 years and they were brought from Europe to Jamestown on one of the
first ships of colonists 400 years ago.

There are 15 kinds of Florida honey; Clover is
starting the fill the niche left by citrus greening.Florida is the 3rd largest honey producer in
the world. The greatest quantity is gallberry and saw palmetto.

Almond
growers in California are dependent upon the February and March shipments of
migratory commercial hives that travel on semi-trucks:24,000 colonies a season.We ship bees to 27 or 28 states a year for
farming pollination.We produce Queens
that are sold and relocated all over the country.

The Florida State Beekeepers Association is
planning a new entomology lab with a teaching lab to seat 400.Besides honey bees, we have over 60 native
species of pollinators in Florida.You
can do your part with planting just a 4-foot by 8-foot plot of native plants. It
will increase your local pollinators by three times.

Roger Hammer. Photo by Vince Lamb

Roger Hammer
thrilled us with photos from his new book:
Central Florida Wildflowers: A Field Guide and his work in progress, which is state-wide. He dedicated the former to his best pal
growing up, his brother, and his parents who “told me to go outside and
play!” He didn’t tell us about how he is
consulting with the Discovery channel on Naked
and Afraid. Probably says things
like “don’t climb a poisonwood tree”.

Dr. Jason Smith
is studying the remnant Glacier period Torreya tree, its demise and its canker
and what other trees the canker will infect. His team has found 645 individual trees in and
around Torreya State Park and Chattahoochee.When they get over a meter tall they show signs of the canker.They die back, re-sprout and it happens
again. Several conifer species that grow in the Great Smoky Mountain National
park (like Frasier Fir) are part of his study. The disease does better in
cooler climates.A do-gooder group called Torreya Guardians is
growing Torreya and planting them in North Carolina and the southern
Appalachians. They say they are getting out ahead of “the science”.It is called “assisted recolonization”.Dr. Smith has tried to share his findings
with them, but hasn’t been able to convince them they may be taking the canker
to other native tree species (which are fitting their own battles). There is a huge, mature Torreya in Madison,
Florida on a lawn.

Osborn. Photo by Vince Lamb

Nathaniel Osborn has a great history book on Indian River Lagoon: An Environmental History. It covers from the north end of the Mosquito
Lagoon in Volusia County all the way south to Hobe Sound. And is a good treatise on how man manipulates
his locale.

Craig Huegel gave
us a common sense lecture: A Gardener’s Guide to How Roots Work
from that chapter in his book in progress.
It starts with “don’t be afraid to pull them out of the pot and see if
they are permanently headed in circles around the inside of the pot before you
buy them”. They will have to be cut off;
they will never stop growing in circles.
Plants are all about water. They
transpire up to 95% of their daily uptake, daily. But they also have to have air pockets around
the roots to breath.

David Hartgrove
of Audubon presented slides and anecdotes of local birds. The Black-Bellied Plover nests in Iceland,
but winters on Daytona Beach and surrounds.
Royal and least terns nest in Florida.
A flock of 10 gull species can be seen all winter, beginning in November,
in a grouping of 10,000 that hangs and roosts on the beach from 1900 S.
Atlantic Ave to the 2000 block, and spends their days at the landfill. Dave leads birding tours to the Dry Tortugas.

Clay Henderson wrapped it all up with a rundown of his career in practicing law and working to

Henderson. Photo by Vince Lamb

protect as much of Florida as possible. He reviewed the history of our land buying programs and encouraged us to take advantage of this election year to let our law makers know we expect them to do right by Amendment 1. People are livid that it is being used to cover general revenue expenses and not for environmental protection as we intended for it. There was $215 M for Everglades’ restoration; $50 M for springs restoration; and $5.1 M for Lake Apopka restoration earmarked, out of $752.5 M

Introduction: Purple berries clinging around stems with bright green foliage make Callicarpa americana stand out from late summer to winter. It is easy to see how beautyberry got its common name. Don’t let its looks fool you though; Callicarpa is more than just eye candy. Callicarpa americana is useful medicinally and as food for wildlife and people. American Beautyberry is not fussy about location, soil or light requirements. This tough plant is an American Beauty in every sense of the word. Its name comes from Greek: Kalli, means beautiful; Karpos means fruit.

Historic Medicinal Uses:
Native Americans had many uses for beautberry, both internally and externally. According to Taylor (1940), Native Americans used beautyberry externally as a steam and topical application. All parts of the pla…

﻿ ﻿Australian pines seem to be everywhere in the coastal regions in the bottom half of Florida. Their name is deceiving because, while they are native to Australia, they aren't pines or even conifers. They are flowering trees with separate male and female flowers, and what look like needles are really green twiglets with close-set circles of tiny leaves that drop at the first sign of a drought. In the photo to the right, the light-colored lines are where leaves where once attached. Most of the photosynthesis takes place in the twiglets.

There are three species of Australian pine (Casuarina spp) that have been imported into Florida for various purposes. They were widely planted to soak up the "swamps" in Florida, stabilize canals, and hold beaches. Unfortunately for Florida's ecosystems, the "pines" accomplished all this and more--like seeding prolifically, growing five feet or more per year, producing dense shade, and emitting an herbicide that kills most a…

These perky natives have numerous and endearing charms. Authors and growers disagree about the proper Latin name, but they are in complete agreement that more people should use more coonties in their landscapes.

What's to like?
Coonties are spritely and graceful in their form, tough as the dickens, bright green all year, and host plant for the beautiful blue atala
hairstreak butterfly. In fact, coonties are the only larval food for atalas. You can use them as specimen or accent plants, mass them together for ground cover, or use them in a line as a border. And to top that off, they have an interesting sex life. A subject we hardly ever get to talk about around here. More on that later. See more in Roger Hammer's 1995 Palmetto article, The Coontie and the Atala Hairstreak.

Slow growers, coonties are more expensive to buy than some other natives by relative size, but don't let that put you off. They are well worth the investment. They can be planted in full sun or fairly …